arcade sounds

Via Laughing Squid comes a nifty series of the lyrics to David Bowie’s timeless ballad “Space Oddity” illustrated through panels, imagined album covers of vintage arcade and console video games. Though not quite lent the psychological heft of one’s own favourite songs or of Mozart to settle one’s mood, video game music (think Коробейники, the Tetris song) is composed specifically to remove distractions and helps to keep one focused.

iso 4217 or beyond the dniester

The autonomous strip of land between Moldova and Ukraine that hugs the Dniester river known as Transnistria or the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic (Приднестровская Молдавская Республика) represents the region that did not want to disassociate itself from Mother Russia as the Soviet Union was dissolving.
Though independent from the Moldovian government, Transnistria’s political status has gone unresolved for more than a decade, enjoying only severely limited international recognition mostly from states in similar situations that generally go unrecognised themselves. This situation has resulted in high-hurdles to trade and permeated economic isolation, only open to a few select markets—which inevitably produces a gun-running economy. The predicament has also led to a few innovations—such as can be curried in such an environment, including a unique coinage to compliment their native, “token” currency. These Transnistrian rouble coins are made out of composite plastic and look to me, endearingly, like guitar-picks.

null-set or four-squares

Æon Magazine features a really inviting and illuminating essay from earlier this Summer on how Eastern thought, Buddhism in particular, which can come across to Western-thinkers as hopelessly mystical and too pliable for admitting contradictions, while saying nothing about inherent truths in any system, prevision—in a sense—and converge in the logical constructs of mathematics, modern set-theories which have applications in computing and high-level physics.

Again—I suppose that the inherent truth behind these disciplines, which appear rigourous and legitmate to the experts that create them, is not something unredoubtable in itself, like claiming that one of the two superficially different modes of philosophy is more enlightened than the other, plus religion and worldly informatics do not necessarily have the same aims. While Aristotle, championed by the Romans and the Church and became the influential standard for scientific investigation, insisted that everything was black and white—everything either was or was not—another, third option was not given, terium non datur, as the Romans called it. Around the same time, Buddha and his disciples were considering a fourth, with the option of a fifth up to the thirty-second degree, option in the range of possibilities by subjecting all question to what’s called catuṣkoṭi, a sort of four corners of being, wherein something is either true and only true, false and only false, partially both or neither true nor false. Concepts like this come across as infuriating often in Western contexts, though many thinkers have touched on this set of logical operators before and they appear contractually in programming and in the maths that allow it. Though on the surface the states of catuṣkoṭi might sound a little like the conjunctions of AND, OR, NOT and XOR, to really start seeing the states as non-contradictory, one can start to think of them in terms of relationship and functions.
The article illustrates this range of connexions through parentage and siblings: mother of is functional since any son or daughter has just one, whereas son of or sister of is relative since there could be any number of permutations, dependent on the family or none at all. This article and discussion is certainly something to step away from and reflect on—rather than reading in one sitting, but it is without a doubt fascinating that mathematicians and logicians came to restore to the same quiver of paradigms as Eastern philosophies, without being some closeted mystic or Buddha-apologist. The fifth option, which could explode into all sorts of other dimensions, is what’s called the ineffable (a pretty neat sounding word): when those paradoxes and fundamental contradictions are handed down to us, seemingly only for the sake of confusion, a kōan—the sound of one hand clapping, we have to admit that it’s an experience too big to get our heads around and thus unspeakable. Presented with this possibilities—that there are things in the cosmos which we cannot articulate or even perceive, certainly seems very real and probably comprises an infinitely bigger part of reality, it seems however that we are just pushing back contradiction by a few powers, which may be significant in itself, by knowing of something that we can’t hope to address or not knowing about it at all.

soviet reunion

On this first day of the new year, after concerted efforts going back to at least 2009, Russia will attempt to rectify what some consider the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the century with the dissolution of the USSR with a single market that spans from Belarus to Kyrgyzstan—with room for many more. The Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) is patterned to some degree off of the institutions of the EU.

This alliance has drawn little attention, since we’re conditioned to think that those economies are primitive and crude kleptocracies, whereas ours are not. Although characterisation in the Western media tend to play up the angle that such a partnership is reigniting the worse tensions of the Cold War, the realisation of the treaty is coincidental and one ought not be enamoured by propaganda from other side, since overtures from Western powers, also seeking to reassert and push regional, authoritative boundaries threatened Russia to a much greater degree than its machinations threaten the Free World. Perceived and actual weaknesses on America’s part did not embolden Russia to act—though mutual chest-thumping may have forced the crisis, nor does pandering to anyone’s dreams of recapturing lost glory, no matter which side. Reaction and judgment seemed much more deferred in the short term if not very forward-looking ultimately when the Soviet Union intervened (at the request of the secular government over fears of a fundamentalist over-throw) and invaded Afghanistan in the early 1980s. Though I am sure that much more was happening behind the curtain, the public face of the response was reciprocal Olympic boycotts and very partisan funding for the insurgents that would eventually metastasize into al Qaeda and associates, in a case of beggar thy enemy. The macroscope of politics and ideology is too big not to try to compartmentalise—and that’s probably also one of the biggest risks.

pop-quiz

BBC’s Monitor Magazine has put together an aggregation of list of one hundred surprising and fun facts, statistics and discoveries made during the last year. It is a variable monkey-house of not mere trivia but rather things that were collectively revealed to us that we did not know before and there are citations associated with each claim to learn more. What is something you found out last year that’s proved enriching?

open you the west door and turn the old year go

Open you the East Door and let the New Year in.

Happy 2015!

universal coordinated time

The tradition of dropping the ball in New York’s Times Square—and derivative celebrations, which began with the year 1908 after fireworks displays were banned in Gotham over safety concerns has much older roots that connect the count-down with navigation on the high-seas and reflect on the nature of time and time-keeping itself. The Naval Observatory in Washington, DC had installed a time-ball in 1845 for the benefit of fleets launching out from the Delmarva Peninsula for the antipodes that fell daily to mark high-noon. This temporal landmark goes back to the Royal Observatory east of London, which rests on the Greenwich meridian. While it was relatively easy for ships at sea to calculate changes in latitude (north, south) by gauging their position under the stars, reckoning degrees, minutes and seconds of longitude proved much more of a challenge.
A navigator could figure how far east or west one had traveled by knowing the difference in time at his present location relative to his point of departure, but clockworks did not yet have their sea-legs and it was not possible to keep good measure, until the development of the sturdy maritime chronometer, invented in 1737 in England, whose chief berth was at Greenwich, later declared to be the Prime Meridian in a convention chaired by US president Grover Cleveland. A bright red ball was installed on the observatory’s bell tower—visible from all around, that has fallen daily since 1833 as an aid cue for passing ships to synchronise their watches—although at 1300 since the crews were busy calibrating earlier with the noon-time angle of the sun. The newspaper magnate wanted to give the gathered crowds a similar cue, bereft of his former pyre and beacons, with a dazzling effect and commissioned the first illuminated ball to be lowered at the stroke of midnight to usher in the New Year.

banned to the bone or disc-jockey jump

Though Western music was officially restricted in Soviet Russia, some bootleg copies of jazz standards and the emerging rock-and-roll were already circulating in the 1950s and the privileged few who got to listen were starving for more and wanted to share—of course, the taboo experience with others. Vinyl as the media, however, came at a high premium and conventional propagation would have aroused the suspicion of censors, so the aficionados/bootleggers/pirates discovered an innovative and resourceful solution: raiding the dumpsters of medical facilities with radiology departments, they took discarded x-ray films and impressed the grooves of the music onto the radiographs. Colossal has a fine little gallery of these improvised albums plus several links that document more on the history of this phenomenon.